Simpler Bugzilla

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

On Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:51:03 -0700 Gervase Markham <gerv at mozilla.org>
wrote:
> I had someone complaining to me recently that Bugzilla's UI was too 
> complicated. I said that some people needed all those fields; he
> replied that still, there was no need to show them by default.

	Sometimes more fields actually makes life simpler, because it
allows better data organization.

	We've improved the UI for 3.2, also.

> Is it worth us considering whether we want to make default Bugzilla
> use fewer fields? Are there some switchable ones turned on by default
> that we could turn off? Or can we put a few more hard-coded ones
> inside [% IF %] blocks to make them switchable?

	We have bugs for this, I'm pretty sure.

	op_sys and platform should be made into custom fields and
should be moved into a plugin (so that they can maintain their magic
"auto-select what the browser tells us" functionality).

> - We could support and ship with SQLite. I suspect it would be all
> that 90% of installations needed, and removes the need to set up and 
> configure MySQL or PgSQL.

	Yes, there's a bug for that and I was working on it.

> - We could ship with a simple Perl webserver or lighttpd, which
> removes the need to set up and configure Apache. We don't use many
> advanced webserver features; as long as it obeys .htaccess files, we
> should be fine.

	"Obeys .htaccess files" is the tricky (or perhaps impossible)
part there.

	-Max